There are certain words that make people flinch.
Religion is one of them.
God might be an even bigger one.
Say the word religion and depending on who you're talking to, you might immediately conjure priests and churches, scripture and sin, mosques and temples, judgment and salvation, community and belonging, wars and abuse, candles and rosaries, rules about bodies and sexuality, beautiful rituals, terrible atrocities, grandmothers praying, people being told they're going to hell, and about six thousand years of human beings arguing over who understands God correctly.
That's a lot for one little word to carry.
And increasingly, I hear people solve the problem by saying:
I'm not religious. I'm spiritual.
I understand what they're saying. I just don't think religion is necessarily what they're rejecting.
I think a lot of us are rejecting corporation.
And maybe we've accidentally let corporation steal the words religion and God in the process.
What the Hell Is Religion Anyway?
Here's something I learned while earning my bachelor's degree in Religious Studies and minor in Philosophy: scholars who literally study religion for a living cannot give you one universally agreed-upon definition of religion.
Which I find delightful.
We have dictionaries, obviously. Merriam-Webster will happily give you definitions involving belief in or worship of God or the supernatural, systems of religious attitudes and practices, and commitment or devotion to religious faith or observance.
But enter Religious Studies and things get considerably messier.
William James was deeply interested in the individual experience of religion and the person's relationship with what they understand as divine. Karl Marx famously called religion the “opium of the people”—although the fuller passage is considerably more compassionate and complicated than the little fragment we've turned into a slogan. Sigmund Freud approached religion as an illusion connected to human longing, helplessness, and our desire for protection.
And then there is Huston Smith, one of my personal favorites, whose life's work took the world's religions seriously as different human encounters with something transcendent and ultimately difficult to contain in language.
These people were studying the same basic human phenomenon and approaching it from profoundly different directions.
So when somebody confidently announces what religion is, my Religious Studies brain immediately wants to raise its hand from the back of the room and say:
Welllllll...
Because maybe religion is harder to contain than we've been pretending.
And if we can't even agree on exactly what religion is, then I think there's another question worth asking:
When someone says they reject religion, what exactly are they rejecting?
Because when I listen to people explain why they want nothing to do with religion, I often don't hear them rejecting mystery, sacredness, ritual, contemplation, community, devotion, or even God.
I hear them rejecting something else.
Something I have come to think of as corporation.
What I Mean When I Say “Corporation”
I need to define this because I'm using the word corporation intentionally, and I don't mean only a legally incorporated business.
I'm talking about a structure: hierarchy, authority, influence, institutional preservation. Money, sometimes enormous amounts of it. Somebody determines what the institution believes. Somebody interprets the rules. Everybody underneath is encouraged—or sometimes required—to buy in.
If you've ever worked in corporate America, you know the language: We need buy-in. This is the company line. This is how we do things here. This came from the top.
And somewhere way down in Building A, some poor person pushing pencils around a desk is expected to arrange themselves around decisions made by somebody sitting several floors above them.
When I look at the human institutions that have grown around many of our world's religions, I sometimes see remarkably similar structures.
That doesn't mean religion is corporation.
It doesn't mean organized religion is inherently bad.
It means human beings are exceptionally talented at taking something enormous and mysterious and sacred and building a fucking organizational chart around it.
And eventually, somebody starts acting like they own the mystery.
That's what I'm calling corporation.
A Tradition Can Be a Pathway to God Without Becoming the Owner of God
I want to make something extremely clear: I am not anti-religion.
I practice Sanātana Dharma, which many people would understand under the enormous umbrella we call Hinduism. I call myself Hindu because that's generally easier than giving everyone I meet an unsolicited Religious Studies lecture.
I have a guru. I have teachers. I have lineage. I have initiation. I practice mantra and ritual and meditation. I study sacred texts. I go to temples. I participate in traditions that existed long before I got here and will hopefully exist long after I'm gone.
Tradition has given me some of the most profound experiences of my life.
And there are Catholics who experience that through the Eucharist, confession, the rosary, Mother Mary, or Mass. There are Jews who encounter God through Torah, prayer, community, ritual, and generations of tradition. There are Muslims who experience the Divine through prayer, surrender, Qur'an, pilgrimage, fasting, and community. There are practitioners within Africana traditions who encounter the sacred through ancestors, divinities, ceremony, community, music, dance, offerings, and relationships with the spiritual world.
There are people all over this planet finding something sacred through the containers humanity has built around God.
That's fucking beautiful.
A tradition can be a pathway to God without becoming the owner of God.
The problem, for me, begins when the pathway announces that it is the destination. When this helps me find God becomes this is the only way anyone can find God. When invitation becomes coercion. When devotion becomes conformity. When this is sacred to me becomes therefore you must do it too.
And when someone else's relationship with God becomes something I believe I have the authority to police.
That's corporation.
And corporation can absolutely exist inside religion.
But it is not religion.
And Yes, Religion Has Hurt People
We can't reclaim these words by pretending people imagined the reasons they became afraid of them.
Human beings have done horrific things in the name of God. Religious authority has been used to control women, sexuality, bodies, relationships, knowledge, political power, and entire populations. Children have been abused by people entrusted with spiritual authority. People have been ostracized from their families and communities. Scripture has been used to justify violence, domination, and exclusion.
And religious identity continues to intersect with some of the most painful conflicts happening in our world—including the enormous grief, violence, displacement, fear, history, identity, and political struggle surrounding Israelis and Palestinians.
None of that disappears because I would like to reclaim the word religion.
But here's where I get stuck:
Why do the people who weaponized God get to define God?
Why do the loudest fundamentalists get the word? Why do the people holding signs telling everyone they're going to hell get the word? Why do corrupt religious leaders get the word? Why does somebody who used scripture to justify hurting another human being get to determine what religion means to me?
I'm not particularly interested in inventing a softer, safer, more palatable word for God simply because human beings have done terrible things while using God's name.
They don't get to keep the word.
We Have Been Translating God for a Very Long Time
There is another layer to this that fascinates me.
Sacred traditions have traveled across centuries, cultures, and languages. The Qur'an is Arabic. Jewish sacred texts preserve Hebrew and Aramaic traditions. Christian scriptures emerged from ancient linguistic worlds. The traditions I study contain Sanskrit texts whose words sometimes require entire paragraphs of English before you even begin to approximate what one word is doing.
Take karma.
We often translate it as action. That's useful.
It's also hilariously insufficient if you think that means you've now captured the philosophical universe surrounding karma.
Or dhyāna, which gets handed to us as meditation. In contemporary English, meditation sounds like something I decide to do for twenty minutes before breakfast. Within Indian philosophical traditions, the terrain surrounding dhyāna can be considerably deeper than our everyday English word suggests.
That's simply what happens with language.
Translation isn't a magical process where every word in Language A has a perfectly identical twin waiting for it in Language B. Translators make choices. Context matters. Culture matters. Words carry histories and associations. Sometimes the closest available word is still only the closest available word.
And then another human being reads the translation.
With their history. Their fears. Their hopes. Their politics. Their wounds. Their understanding of the world.
And suddenly we're several layers deep into human beings interpreting the Divine.
Maybe we could have a little humility about that.
We Even Get Other Religions Wrong
We flatten religions we barely understand into whatever version fits most easily inside our existing worldview.
Hinduism? Oh, they have lots of gods.
Well...sort of. And also absolutely not. And also sometimes. And welcome to several thousand years of philosophy that we do not have time to unpack in this blog post.
Judaism gets flattened. Islam gets flattened. Christianity gets flattened. Indigenous and Africana traditions get flattened, dismissed, or shoved into categories created by people outside of those traditions.
Even Satanism.
Yes. Satanism.
The Satanic Temple's stated tenets include compassion, empathy, bodily autonomy, justice, reason, correcting one's mistakes, and avoiding unnecessary harm.
Which is objectively hilarious considering what many people imagine when somebody says Satanist.
I'm not suggesting everybody run out and become a Satanist tomorrow.
I'm saying:
Maybe we don't know nearly as much about one another as we think we do.
And perhaps God is considerably bigger than the boxes we've built.
Tuna Fish Sandwich
I know what it's like to struggle with the word God because I struggled with it myself.
I was raised Catholic. My children were baptized Catholic because Catholicism was the language for God that I understood when I became a mother.
But my search kept going.
Eventually I found Hindu traditions. I studied religion academically. I studied philosophy. I graduated summa cum laude with a GPA that would have been a 4.22 if my university had allowed anything above a 4.0 on the final record.
I have studied this shit.
But one of the most important theological lessons of my life did not come from a professor.
It involved a tuna fish sandwich.
Early in my journey, after I had already encountered Hinduism, I was studying A Course in Miracles. It's an extraordinarily esoteric spiritual text with Christian language throughout it, recorded by psychologist Helen Schucman, who described receiving an inner dictation she understood as the voice of Jesus.
And God is fucking everywhere in that book.
At the time, I still struggled with that word.
God.
It carried baggage for me. It carried somebody else's definitions. Somebody else's rules. Somebody else's image of who God was supposed to be.
And one day a woman in our book group essentially told me:
If you don't like the word God, substitute something else. Call it tuna fish sandwich.
I have never forgotten it.
Because somehow, absurdly, tuna fish sandwich gave God back to me.
Suddenly the word didn't belong to Catholicism. It didn't belong to Christianity. It didn't belong to a priest. It didn't belong to a book. It didn't belong to somebody standing behind a pulpit.
It belonged to me.
I was allowed to ask what God meant.
And that changed everything.
Either God Is Everything or God Isn't
Here's the part that really gets me.
We describe God as omnipresent. Omniscient. All-knowing. All-seeing. All-powerful. Everywhere.
And then approximately thirty seconds later somebody tells me:
But God is only this.
Wait.
Which is it?
Either God is everything or God isn't.
What if God is not merely a being somewhere outside of us watching all of this happen? What if God is the tree? The sunlight? The water? The bird? The person beside you? The person you cannot fucking stand? The chocolate cake? The strawberries? Your children? The dancing? The singing? The grief?
What if God is the moment you almost said something cruel and chose not to? The hug somebody gave you when your world collapsed? The tiny voice inside you saying, This isn't right. Leave. The voice saying, Try again. The voice saying, Become.
What if God is the invitation into the becoming?
My Highly Sophisticated Play-Doh Theology
Here's how I explain Oneness when I don't feel like giving anyone a philosophy lecture.
Play-Doh.
You hand a kid one giant ball of Play-Doh. They make a horse. A person. A house. A flower. A tower. Maybe something completely deranged that they insist is a dinosaur.
Now there appear to be twenty different things sitting on the table.
But what are they?
Play-Doh.
Different forms.
Same substance.
And when they're finished, you smash the horse and the person and the flower and the weird dinosaur back together.
One ball.
That's increasingly how I understand existence.
You are you. I am me. The tree is the tree. The bird is the bird.
And somehow underneath all these extraordinary individual forms is the same thing.
God.
Consciousness.
Divinity.
Oneness.
Tuna fish sandwich.
Call it whatever the hell you want.
The name isn't the thing.
But If Everything Is God, Isn't the Shitty Stuff God Too?
Yep.
This is where my theology gets inconvenient.
If I say God is everything, I don't get to quietly remove everything I dislike from the definition.
War exists. Cruelty exists. Abuse exists. Grief exists. Fear exists. Human beings do unbelievably terrible things to one another.
I am not interested in telling someone experiencing profound suffering that their suffering is secretly wonderful or that they should be grateful because God is teaching them a lesson.
Sometimes something is fucking awful.
But what if God doesn't require me to pretend otherwise?
What if sometimes the Divine thing available in suffering is simply the choice:
I do not accept this. I will not participate in this. I will not pass this pain forward.
Maybe God is the possibility of another choice.
And yes, by my own logic, corporation exists within God too.
I know.
Annoying.
But I think corporation is what happens when human beings choose into fear—when our relationship with mystery becomes something we need to control, define, own, protect, monetize, enforce, or use to dominate someone else.
And if human beings can choose into that expression of God...
What happens when we choose into another one?
What If God Is the Internal Guru?
I believe deeply in teachers.
I have one.
And I understand why human beings seek them. Sometimes we enter a tradition precisely because there are people there who have been walking a path much longer than we have. We want someone we can ask questions. Someone who can challenge us. A guru, rabbi, priest, imam, elder, teacher, mentor, or guide who can say, Have you considered looking at it this way?
There is enormous value in not having to walk every path alone.
I believe in lineage. Scripture. Ritual. Ceremony. Community. Temples. Practices. Guidance.
These things have changed my life.
But I don't believe any exterior teacher owns my access to God.
There is a difference between allowing someone to guide my discernment and asking someone to replace my discernment.
I can listen to my teacher. I can take what I've been given home with me. I can study it. Sit with it. Practice it. Question it. Notice what happens inside me. Return with more questions. Learn some more.
A teacher can help me hear.
I become concerned when I'm being taught not to listen.
Because what if the ultimate guru is also internal?
What if there is something within us capable of recognizing truth—not objective truth that everybody else must obey, but that deep interior knowing that tells us where we are being called?
Then the exterior teacher becomes an offering rather than an owner. The scripture becomes an offering. The temple becomes an offering. The ritual becomes an offering. The religion becomes an offering.
I can choose the exterior expression of God without surrendering the interior one.
And if I don't need the exterior expression right now?
God didn't disappear.
What If We're Choosing Which Face of God We Meet?
This is the question underneath almost everything I've been thinking about.
What if some of the pain we've created in this world exists because human beings keep choosing into fear?
Fear of one another. Fear of difference. Fear of being wrong. Fear of losing control. Fear of losing power. Fear of death.
Fear, ultimately, of our own perceived non-existence.
I've heard a version of that last idea through The Great Mystery School—that so much of human fear ultimately traces back to the “fear of our perceived non-existence”, aka the fear of death—and it has stayed with me.
Because imagine, just for a moment, that we weren't terrified of disappearing.
I'm not claiming physics proves an afterlife. It doesn't.
But even materially, the universe is transformation. The matter and energy involved in this body do not simply become metaphysical “nothing” when the particular arrangement called me changes.
What happens to consciousness?
I don't fucking know.
I have beliefs.
You probably do too.
Maybe you believe you'll see everyone you love in heaven. Maybe you believe in reincarnation. Maybe you imagine returning to the earth. Maybe you think consciousness merges into something larger. Maybe you believe death is simply the end of individual experience.
What if we could make room for each other there?
What if God wasn't demanding that we solve the mystery correctly?
Maybe God Doesn't Need a Gender Either
If God is everything, then God cannot be exclusively male.
Or exclusively female.
Or confined to any single expression of gender.
I sometimes say He. Sometimes She. Sometimes Mother. Sometimes Divine. Sometimes Consciousness. Sometimes I don't need a word at all.
Because if God contains everything, then surely God contains every expression we use to reach toward God—and exceeds every single one of them.
If God created us all differently, why the hell would God need to look exactly the same to all of us?
Maybe diversity isn't evidence that humanity has gotten God wrong.
Maybe diversity is one of the ways God expresses God.
“I'm Spiritual, Not Religious”
So when somebody tells me, I'm not religious. I'm spiritual, I understand.
Truly.
I used to be afraid of these words too.
But now part of me wants to lovingly say:
Are you sure?
Because maybe you don't hate religion.
Maybe you hate being controlled. Maybe you hate judgment. Maybe you hate being told that somebody else's interpretation of God outranks your direct experience of your own life. Maybe you hate hierarchy being confused with holiness. Maybe you hate fear dressed up as devotion.
Maybe you hate corporation.
I do too.
But I'm not giving it the word religion.
And I am sure as hell not giving it God.
What Could Religion Be?
What if religion could be the way we consciously enter into relationship with the sacred?
What if it could be chocolate cake and strawberries? Prayer and dancing? Rosaries and mantras? Tea and scripture? Science and magic? A mosque and a forest? A temple and your kitchen table?
What if religion could include sitting beside someone whose understanding of God is completely different from yours and being genuinely fascinated instead of threatened?
What if the Christian could talk to the Satanist? The Jew to the Muslim? The atheist to the Hindu?
What if Africana traditions were approached with curiosity and reverence rather than reduced to somebody else's category of superstition?
What if our first question stopped being:
Which one of us is right?
And became:
Where do you find God?
Tell me.
I actually want to know.
Maybe We're Not Waiting for a Better World
Hindu cosmology speaks of Satya Yuga, an age associated with truth and the fullness of dharma.
And I sometimes wonder about that—not as a prediction I'm waiting around for, but as an invitation.
What if a more beautiful world isn't something that arrives because the cosmic calendar finally flips over?
What if we participate in creating it every time we choose differently?
If fear is available, perhaps love is available. If domination is available, perhaps relationship is available. If judgment is available, perhaps curiosity is available. If violence is available, perhaps refusal is available.
If corporation is available, perhaps religion is available too.
And perhaps God is present in the space where we choose.
They Don't Get to Keep It
I don't need you to believe what I believe.
Actually, please don't believe something merely because I wrote it on the internet.
Look. Question. Study. Experience.
Pray.
Don't pray.
Read the sacred texts. Sit underneath a tree. Go to Mass. Visit a temple. Make tea. Talk to someone whose religion scares you. Ask why. Listen to the answer. Change your mind if you need to.
Call God Allah.
Call God Brahman.
Call God Mother.
Call God Àṣẹ.
Call God consciousness.
Call God nature.
Call God love.
Call God absolutely nothing.
Call God tuna fish sandwich if that's what gets you through the fucking door.
But maybe don't surrender the mystery simply because somebody else tried to own it.
Because maybe religion was never supposed to be somebody else deciding what you're allowed to believe.
Maybe it is the relationship itself.
Maybe God isn't waiting at the end of the correct set of beliefs.
Maybe God is the thing underneath all of them.
The silence. The question. The person asking it. The person answering. The space between them. The fear. The possibility of choosing differently. The grief. The strawberry. The chocolate cake.
The whole ridiculous Play-Doh universe.
All of it.
And if that's even possibly true, then I'm not interested in finding another word because this one has been misused.
They don't get to keep the word God.
And neither does anybody else.
Maybe that's the whole fucking point.
